Linda Kirschke is a predoctoral fellow at CISAC. She is a PhD candidate at Princeton University, in the Department of Politics, and her research focuses on state politics and ethnic violence. She published "Informal repression, zero sum politics and late third wave transitions" in the Journal of Modern African Studies in 2000. Drawing on the cases of Cameroon, Rwanda and Kenya, this article shows that transitions to multiparty politics place Sub-Saharan South Africa at high risk for civil violence. Kirschke was a Eurasia Title VIII Fellow at the Social Science Research Council in 2002-03, working on Russian language training. In 2003-04, she was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Pre-Dissertation Fellowship at Columbia Universityís Council for European Studies. Kirschke has a BA in French and African studies and has worked for human rights organizations in France, London and Africa.

Stanford Law School, the Stanford Rule of Law Program, the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, Santa Clara University School of Law, and the Santa Clara Institute of International and Comparative Law will host a Global Jurisprudence Colloquium at Stanford University on March 17-18, 2005, on the theme of Decisions of International Legal Institutions: Compliance and Enforcement. The Colloquium will provide leading judges from a number of key international courts and tribunals with an opportunity to interact and share with the Stanford community and the public their insights into issues presented by the growing use of international courts to promote the rule of law.

Distinguished international jurists scheduled to participate in the Colloquium include Judges Higgins and Owada of the International Court of Justice, Judges Pillay and Song of the International Criminal Court, President Meron and Judge Robinson of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Judge Mumba of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Judge Ameli of the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal, Judge Kokott of the European Court of Justice, Judge Greve of the European Court of Human Rights, and President Robertson of the Special Court for Sierra Leone.

On March 18, the Colloquium participants, joined by distinguished international law and international relations faculty, will hold three panel discussions, each on a particular theme related to the historic challenge to improve enforcement of international law and efforts to enhance the rule of law. These panel discussions will be held at Stanford Law School and are open to the University community and the public.

Liz McBride, Director of the Post-Conflict Development Initiative at the London-based Internatinal Rescue Committee will discuss state reconstruction challenges following violent conflict in the developing world. McBride is a visiting researcher in the spring quarter at CDDRL. She has worked in humanitarian relief and post-conflict reconstruction in Tanzania and Rwanda. McBride's responsibilities at the International Rescue Committee include creating and ensuring implementation of new institutional program frameworks in response to the changing nature of humanitarian aid; overseeing technical areas of community driven reconstruction, good governance, civil society, local capacity development, conflict resolution and economic development; and supporting service delivery technical units in defining post-conflict strategies and priorities (i.e. health, education). She also works intensively with the International Rescue Committee's primary target post-conflict countries: Sudan and South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Liberia.

Gayle Smith is a renowned expert on African politics and economics. She has worked on failed states, post-conflict management, and transnational threats in Africa for over 20 years. She served as Special Assistant to the President of the United States and Senior Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council under the Clinton Administration. Smith negotiated a ceasefire between Uganda and Rwanda in 1999 and won the National Security Council's Samuel Nelson Drew Award for Distinguished Contribution in Pursuit of Global Peace for her role in the negotiated peace agreement between Eritrea and Ethiopia. She has travelled extensively in active war zones and published pioneering analyses of political emergencies and humanitarian interventions in Africa in particular.

U.S. President George W. Bush came to power emphasizing that he did not regard nation-building as an appropriate activity for the U.S. military. As he prepares to run for re-election, the United States is engaged in two of the most ambitious nation-building projects in its history in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. undertook a lead role in part because of the circumstances in which the two conflicts commenced, but also as an extension of the present administration's more general opposition to multilateral institutions such as the United Nations. Though the United States determined that it did not need the UN going into Iraq, however, it appears that it has belatedly realized it might need the UN in order to get out.

Simon Chesterman is Executive Director of the Institute for International Law and Justice at New York University School of Law. Prior to joining NYU, he was a Senior Associate at the International Peace Academy and Director of UN Relations at the International Crisis Group in New York. He had previously worked for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Belgrade and at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha.

He is the author of You, The People: The United Nations, Transitional Administration, and State-Building (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Just War or Just Peace? Humanitarian Intervention and International Law (Oxford University Press, 2001), which was awarded the American Society of International Law Certificate of Merit. He is the editor, with Michael Ignatieff and Ramesh Thakur, of Making States Work: State Failure and the Crisis of Governance (United Nations University Press, forthcoming) and of Civilians in War (Lynne Rienner, 2001). He regularly contributes to international law and political science journals, as well as mass media publications such as the International Herald Tribune. His has taught at the Universities of Melbourne, Oxford, Southampton, and Columbia.